Jennifer Basham is a 35-year-old ex-nun from the Mount Saint Benedict Monastery in Crookston, Minn. She entered the sisterhood in 2007 and left in 2012. The median age of her fellow sisters: 81. The sister who was closest in age to Basham was in her 60s. It was challenging for her, to say the least.
A recent study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (or CARA) shows that there has been a drop of participants in the sisterhood by 72.5 percent since 1966. The same study shows that there are more sisters at the age of 90 than there are under 60. At this rate, the sisterhood appears to be on the verge of dying out.
“I would see pictures in the photo albums where sisters in the habits had a bowling team,” Basham said. “Sisters having a baseball team, sisters marching on Washington protesting, and yet, when they’re in their 80s and 90s, they can’t do that anymore.”
Many of the jobs Basham had in the monastery involved helping the other sisters accomplish tasks that have become difficult in an older age.
But there was more to the age difference than physical ability. Basham was having a difficult time empathizing with her peers in the monastery, and vice versa. She stressed the difficulty of being able to relate and live with a group so much older than she is.
“And me trying to do some of those activities was looked down upon because it’s not what the community was doing,” Basham said.
Catholic parishes themselves have been disappearing in the last few decades. At its peak in 1988, there were 19,705 Catholic parishes scattered across the United States. Since then, the country has lost 2,222.
In its report, CARA explicitly stated, “This concentration of elderly sisters, which characterizes nearly all religious institutes, is perhaps the single greatest challenge to attracting new vocations.”
This is not a trend isolated to Crookston. The monastery at St. Scholastica in Duluth is seeing an almost identical tendency of age discrepancy.
“There are 81 members in our community,” said Sister Luella Wegscheid, administrative assistant to the prioress at St. Scholastica. “The average age is 78 years of age.”
But for St. Scholastica, this is not exclusively due to aging sisters. Many of the women who decide to dedicate themselves to the holy life of the sisterhood are already up in years.
“Women are older when they enter our community,” Wegscheid said.
Nationally this is proven to be untrue. The National Religious Vocation Conference reported recently that the average age of women entering into sisterhoods stands at the ripe young age of 32.
These trends do not get Basham down. She keeps high spirits for the sisterhood nationwide.
“We’re just in a lull,” Basham said. “These lulls can last a hundred years, and that’s normal. So will it die out completely? No. The spirit is there.”